Greater New Orleans

The owner of the rights to the works of William Faulkner, left, sued Sony Pictures Classics over what it says is unfair use of a Faulkner quote in the Woody Allen film 'Midnight in Paris.'
(The Times-Picayune archive)

Sony Pictures Classics has won
a lawsuit filed against it by the estate of William Faulkner, which claimed
that the studio violated the estate's intellectual property rights by using a
nine-word Faulkner quote in the Oscar-winning Woody Allen film "Midnight in
Paris." "We were confident that the judge in this case would get it right,
and he did," a
Sony rep told Deadline after the ruling was issued late last week.

Mississippi-based U.S.
District Court Judge Michael Mills dismissed the case at Sony's request, noting
that one of the deciding factors was that the quote was spoken in a movie as
opposed to being used in another written work. "The court ...
considers it relevant that the copyrighted work is a serious piece of
literature lifted for use in a speaking part in a movie comedy, as opposed to a
printed portion of a novel printed in a newspaper, or a song's melody sampled
in another song. This transmogrification in medium tips this factor in favor of
transformative, and thus, fair use," Mills wrote.

In
the film, Wilson's character cites Faulkner when saying: "The past is not
dead! Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he
was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party."

In
Faulkner's novel "Requiem for a Nun," the passage -- one of Faulkner's most
often quoted -- reads, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

"Midnight in
Paris," the screenplay for which earned
Allen his fourth Oscar in February 2012, is a literary fantasy in which Wilson
plays a successful Hollywood screenwriter whose visit to the French capital
offers him the ultimate in inspiration -- but that also threatens to take him
further from the woman he is about to marry.

As part of his
ruling, Mills quipped: "The court has viewed Woody Allen's movie, 'Midnight in Paris,' read the book, 'Requiem
for a Nun,' and is thankful that the parties did not ask to compare 'The Sound
and the Fury' with 'Sharknado.'"